


Breaking Things

by HenryMercury



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/F, Self-Harm, Vague spoilers for Smoke & Shadow part 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-29 23:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5143022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the fatal flaw in Ty Lee's evident love for her: it is too careful to ever bruise or burn. Until it does these things Azula will feel it no more than she feels the still air touching her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breaking Things

Azula keeps a small pocket mirror with her things, the makeup and hygiene supplies she travels with. It hasn't withstood the journey well; it is cracked and missing a piece, the remainder sharp like a mouthful of jagged teeth. She looks at the distorted selves it throws back at her, runs the knuckle of her first finger down the longest edge until she feels the familiar pinch and sting of slicing skin. It is tiny—barely even pain, everything to do with control. Everything to do with affirming her own aliveness, focusing, calling herself to attention. A meditation, bright and tense.

Ty Lee arrives at her side. It's rare that she ever leaves it, and she has only been gone for a matter of minutes this time. She looks at the perfect drop of blood beading on Azula's hand and says nothing, passes no judgment until she is told what her verdict ought to be. That is certainly how Ty Lee appears to operate, anyway. She is almost _too_ obedient. Sometimes Azula tells her to leave just so that she can speak with Mai awhile, be drily mocked and return the jabs. It is always contrast that provides satisfaction; it is suffering (or the absence thereof) that defines wellbeing. Some risk of loss that makes a victory. Ty Lee is relentlessly sweet and sometimes Azula needs Mai's bitterness just to cleanse her palate.

"Get a cloth," she instructs Ty Lee, who returns a minute later with a square of soft fabric dampened with warm water. She passes it to Azula, careful not to knock her cut knuckle, as though a touch like that could actually cause Azula pain.

This is the fatal flaw in Ty Lee's evident love for her: it is too careful to ever bruise or burn, and until it does these things Azula will feel it no more than she feels the still air touching her. She will continue to accept her devotion, of course, but it is hard to be excited by what one has always simply had.

"So what's your new brilliant plan for conquering Ba Sing Se?" Ty Lee asks, too conversationally.

"I'll relay the details as they become relevant."

"Oh, that sounds like a clever way to do it. You're so strategic."

It isn't that Azula doesn't need anyone to praise her. She enjoys being flattered, and it allays the doubts that sometimes spring up like weeds in her mind. But words like these matter less when they're falling in a constant stream from lips which have never dared breathe a negative word. Azula is a high achiever, and this bar is too low. She steps over it. After all, where is the glory in adoration that _obviously_ does not have to be earned? Like Mother's love for Zuko: an utterly inaccurate indication of his worthiness. Father's love, all the more challenging to attract, is worth much more.

Azula watches the pink lipstick of Ty Lee's mouth and considers kissing it, because she knows she could, that the action would be not only allowed but welcomed—but knowing this already, she doesn't see why she should bother. There is nothing left to win of Ty Lee, no wall left to break down or sneak through.

 

*

 

Doubt is among the worst of contagions. Azula is supposed to be the sovereign now, supreme ruler of the Fire Nation, and yet she can feel the doubt radiating from everyone around her. She finds a pit in a cherry and she too doubts, doubts that it could truly be an accident, doubts her own ability to know for sure, and therefore chooses to cut the problem off like a gangrenous limb. She exiles anyone in whose eyes her own doubt is reflected.

Her jaw, elbow and hip still ache from where she hit the ground, loose-bodied as a passed-out drunk. Her muscles ache in memory of Ty Lee's jabbing fingers. She sees big round grey eyes, uncertainty twirling through them like ink falling into water, the once-clear affection still visible but doomed to cloud, already infected. She'd been unable to lift her head to look Ty Lee squarely in the face. Rolling her eyes upward in their sockets instead, her former friend had seemed much taller than ever before.

Ty Lee rots, now, in a cell at the Boiling Rock. That is unless the reports Azula's received have been lies. Perhaps they are; perhaps Ty Lee and Mai have escaped. She wonders whether they will flee her or come for her. She wonders which she hopes for.

The hesitant touches of the servants grooming her—their increasingly shaky hands—remind her of the old Ty Lee. In one moment, altogether unexpectedly, that girl had disappeared. Azula feels the bruised spots on her rib, presses them with her own fingertips, feels Ty Lee's touch acutely. She wonders how much affection a traitor could still harbour, bets she could unlock it, wants more than ever to take Ty Lee's face in her hands and find out. She _wants_ , now that there is something of Ty Lee to be tamed, reclaimed; rough edges and hardened parts to make her _feel_ it. She wants to kiss that pink mouth now that she knows it could bite.

Mother shows up, stuffed full of her faux concern. Azula hates her, and hates her own inability to stop listening as Mother lies and _lies_. She throws her useless hairbrush at the offending mirror, which shatters. Still barefoot from her failed pedicure, she steps on the glass shards. The moment of impact is a vivid starburst of reality, superior reality that makes a dull laughable shadow of Mother's voice and form. Azula walks, trailing footprints across floorboards, carpet and tile. Some of the glass pieces fall out on the way while others burrow deeper into her soles.

But her body accommodates, the pain becomes her new equilibrium, and clarity recedes again.

 

*

 

"How did you find me?" Azula asks the girl—young woman, she should admit by now—at the door. "No one else has found me."

Ty Lee just shrugs. "I looked," is all the answer she gives. "Can I come in?" she looks past Azula through the door of the small cottage. A hovel, by the standards of a princess. It still bears the markings (tapestries and ornate teacups, mostly) of its prior owner, a solitary, elderly woman. Azula hadn't even forced her to leave; she had agreed to be taken in as a lodger at first. The woman had volunteered to leave not so long after that, however.

"If you must." Azula steps aside to allow Ty Lee in. Ty Lee's swinging braid slaps against her shoulder as she passes, and her elbow catches Azula's hipbone. The doorway is quite narrow. Ty Lee does not apologise. Azula suppresses a smile. She'd be lying if she said she hadn't thought about Ty Lee finding her. She has also imagined Zuko, Mother, Mai, the Avatar, even Father showing up here—but Ty Lee... Ty Lee finding her is the most agreeable of all these scenarios. Azula shuts the log door, sealing them both in.

"You look terrible, Azula," Ty Lee observes her in the light of the many candles around the room. They burn an ordinary yellow. The blue flames she'd kept at first had made her see things in the dark peripheries.

Azula knows how she looks; she glances at herself from time to time in the old woman's mirror, a window just large enough to fit her face, framed in carved wood. She knows well the new depth of her eye sockets, the extra ashenness of her face. Her lips are always dry, here—a superficial thing that seems like it shouldn't matter, until one has to endure one's mouth cracking like baked earth. Sometimes she bites at them to make it worse.

She observes Ty Lee in kind; she looks much the same, though she dresses in different clothes—earth kingdom garb. Azula wants to strip the green items off her and replace them with things from her own wardrobe—but this is an obsolete impulse; Azula only has the set of robes she wore when she escaped Zuko on their trip to find Mother. Otherwise she wears rags, things borrowed from the same commoner whose house she inhabits.

Ty Lee looks a little tired, but next to Azula she glows. The candlelight plays off sharper cheekbones than Azula remembers. She wants to run a knuckle down one, feel the edge under Ty Lee's soft skin, the knife hidden under the pillow.

_You look terrible, Azula._

"You don't," she replies at last.

Ty Lee doesn't even smile at the compliment, and Azula wonders what it will take to make her. She steps closer, closer again, being careful not to trip over the corner of the shaggy carpet on the floor. She reaches out and cups Ty Lee's cheek.

Ty Lee flinches just the tiniest bit, but doesn't move otherwise. She doesn't look at Azula with hope or disgust, doesn't look at her at all.

"Why did you come looking?" Azula asks.

"I guess I just didn't like not knowing. Where you were, how you were. Mai's dating someone new, you know."

It's an abrupt change of subject, but Azula will allow it. Mai's reasons for leaving Zuzu—even now that he's Fire Lord, and even though she had stayed with him during all his years of exile and confusion—must be interesting.

"At first she was just using him to play some political game—you should have seen her, calling him _babe_. Smiling, but only to manipulate him. It was hard to watch. The political play didn't even work out quite how she wanted it to—it actually kind of backfired in the end—but now apparently she's giving him a real chance, and he's giving her another one."

Or perhaps it wasn't a change of subject after all.

"Have you come here to give me a second chance, Ty Lee?" she asks.

"No. More like to find out if I ever could."

"And could you?" Azula raises a brow, careful not to appear too affectionate, or pleading. She opens up just the right amount. Strategically.

"That depends on what you want a second chance _at_."

 

*

 

Ty Lee kisses her slowly. Too slowly. Azula covers her hands with her own and angles the fingertips down between her ribs, presses the too-blunt nails into her skin as best she can.

"Careful," says Ty Lee. "I wouldn't want to hurt you." Soft lips, no sign of teeth. Soft breaths, little sounds of encouragement, never a torn scream, never a complaint.

It hasn't even been a full season since she showed up on Azula's stolen doorstep. The cold outside hasn't shifted yet, but already all the ice has melted from Ty Lee's eyes. There is nothing jagged there at all. She kisses too slowly but trusts too fast, and each day Azula grows surer that the person she wants, the one she missed, was just an aberration.

"You can kiss me harder, you know," she says, a request that has become irritable with repetition. Ty Lee laughs and for a single moment her weight presses Azula's wrists down into the lumpy bed, pins her there. A firmer mouth greets her neck. And it's almost, almost—

"I wouldn't want to hurt you, that's all," says Ty Lee, pulling away again, brushing all the different scars she can see like she'd undo them if only she could, like they were accidents, mistakes and not welcome proof that Azula rules over herself. "I'm sorry I ever did."

Hands drift over Azula's skin, light as ghosts, and she doubts them all the way. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come chat with me on [tumblr](http://henrymercury.tumblr.com/).


End file.
